Sovereigntism vs. anti-corruption messianism: a salient post-Soviet cleavage of populist mobilization

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the commonalities of populist mobilizations in the post-Soviet region. It identifies a salient populist cleavage between two political projects that differ fundamentally about their focal point of political action: externalist sovereigntism and internalist anti-corruption messianism. While sovereigntism takes a defensive stance repelling foreign forces hostile to “the people,” anti-corruption messianism offensively tackles cronyism impeding developmental salvation for “the people.” The paper reconstructs six sovereigntist and anti-corruption projects, which have unfolded across different non-democratic regimes in Russia, Armenia, and Ukraine throughout the past decade. It is argued that the conflict between sovereigntism and anti-corruption messianism relates to a twofold, distinctively post-Soviet constellation: uncertainty over conflictual geopolitical abeyance and the exasperation over social closure due to the prevalence of oligarchical patronalism. In this context, both populist projects constitute powerful strategies of solidarity-forging under conditions in which other channels of political articulation have been either blocked or exhausted.

KEYWORDS:

• Populism
• mobilization
• sovereigntism
• corruption
• post-Soviet region

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their stimulating comments, as well as the organizers and participants of the two panels “Belief and Populism: A Troubled Relationship” at the ASEEES Annual Convention in San Francisco, 23–26 November 2019, and “Economic Governance, the Radical Right, and Illiberalism” at the virtual 14th ECPR General Conference, 24–28 August 2020 for discussing earlier versions of this article. Particular thanks apply to Mihai Varga for his encouragement and careful comments on the manuscript, Katharina Bluhm for challenging me on the notion of populism, and Cosima Glahn and Friedrich Asschenfeldt for extensive discussions on the topic.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. A historical conjuncture may be defined as “a space of time within which a particular combination … of causes exercises a predominant (causal and imaginative) influence over the course of events and the production of ideas” (Rosenberg 2005, 29).

2. The categorization builds on the latest Freedom House score in the Nations in Transit 2020 report (Freedom House 2020).

3. References to populism as a political project have frequently been made in scholarly analyses, e.g. regarding the Trumpian political project, see Eiermann (2016). For a profound summary of debates on the definition of populism and its political consequences see Pappas (2017) and Lara (2018).

4. Casullo (2019) defines repertoires as “socially shared discursive templates that determine legitimate or accepted ways for populist leaders to act, talk, dress and that indicate what life-stories are more suitable for a politician to tell. Repertories are socially generated and circulated but they are not totally fixed … . [R]epertoires act as possible paths to leadership, that are resonant with social groups at given times and places and that they can be used by individuals to present themselves as prospective leaders.”

5. This is not to say that the study of populism’s role in Eastern European history has not produced fascinating scholarship of its own. See, among others, the contributions by Andrzej Walicki and Ghita Ionescu in Ionescu and Gellner (1970).

6. Oligarchy, at the most general level, denotes “the politics of wealth defense by materially endowed actors” (Winters 2011, 7).

7. High-modernist ideology is a “strong … version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws” (Scott 1998, 4).

8. Neoliberal policies are political measures seeking to establish privatized, liberalized, deregulated, and market-driven modes of coordination, management, and implementation and, by doing so, envisage a retreated role of state agencies in social processes (Ferguson 2010).

9. This refers to populism’s horizontal dimension. As Brubaker (2017) argues, “[r]ight-wing populism construes the people as a culturally or ethnically bounded collectivity with a shared and distinctive way of life and sees that collectivity as threatened by outside groups or forces (including internal outsiders: those living on the inside who, even when they are citizens of the state, are not seen as belonging, or fully belonging, to the nation).”

10. Surkov’s recent ideological advances are interesting as well, if at the same time outstandingly bizarre. In an article entitled “The Long-Standing State of Putin,” he builds on Lev Gumilev’s concept of ethnogenesis to argue that the history of the Russian and Soviet state will naturally culminate in the logic of the so-called “Putinite state.” By doing so, he further inflames the imagination of a populist leader, who is supposed to be indispensable for the fate of the “Russian people” (see Surkov 2019).

11. See also https://union.navalny.com/.

12. See also Garin Hovannisian’s impressive documentary, I Am Not Alone (2019).

13. See Caucasus Barometer 2015, https://caucasusbarometer.org/en/cb2015am/INTACIN/.

14. SIPRI Military Expenditure Database for 1949-2017, https://www.sipri.org/databases/milex.

15. His role as owner of Roshen has earned him the nickname “the Chocolate King.”